Catarina Pacheco is currently Assistant Researcher at Bioengineering and Synthetic Microbiology Group, i3S and Invited Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Sciences of University of Porto. Over the last 5 years she has focused her research on the engineering of photoautotrophic chassis based on Synechocystis PCC 6803 to produce value-added compounds and in the development and characterization of SynBio tools, such as regulatory elements and plasmids. C. Pacheco published 28 papers in ISI indexed journals and several book chapters.  She participated in several national and international projects including the EU-funded FP5 BOMBBE, FP6 BioModularH2, FP7 CyanoFactory and ITN-EJD PhotoBioCat. C. Pacheco has been actively involved in public communication of science, and in the supervision of undergraduate (including Erasmus) and master students in the Synthetic Biology field.